Writing the Classroom: Pedagogical Documents as Rhetorical Genres

Writing the Classroom explores how faculty compose and use pedagogical documents to establish classroom expectations and teaching practices, as well as to articulate the professional identities they perform both inside and outside the classroom.
 
The contributors to this unique collection employ a wide range of methodological frameworks to demonstrate how pedagogical genres—even ones as seemingly straightforward as the class syllabus—have lives extending well beyond the classroom as they become part of how college teachers represent their own academic identities, advocate for pedagogical values, and negotiate the many external forces that influence the act of teaching. Writing the Classroom shines a light on genres that are often treated as two-dimensional, with purely functional purposes, arguing instead that genres like assignment prompts, course proposals, teaching statements, and policy documents play a fundamental role in constructing the classroom and the broader pedagogical enterprise within academia.
 
Writing the Classroom calls on experienced teachers and faculty administrators to critically consider their own engagement with pedagogical genres and offers graduate students and newer faculty insight into the genres that they may only now be learning to inhabit as they seek to establish their personal teacherly identities. It showcases the rhetorical complexity of the genres written in the service of pedagogy not only for students but also for the many other audiences within academia that have a role in shaping the experience of teaching.
 
Contributors: Michael Albright, Lora Arduser, Lesley Erin Bartlett, Logan Bearden, Lindsay Clark, Dana Comi, Zack K. De Piero, Matt Dowell, Amy Ferdinandt Stolley, Mark A. Hannah, Megan Knight, Laura R. Micciche, Cindy Mooty, Dustin Morris, Kate Navickas, Kate Nesbit, Jim Nugent, Lori A. Ostergaard, Cynthia Pengilly, Jessica Rivera-Mueller, Christina Saidy, Megan Schoen, Virginia Schwarz, Christopher Toth
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Release date: Nov 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781646422920

Book preview

Cover Page for Writing the Classroom

Writing the Classroom

Writing the Classroom

Pedagogical Documents as Rhetorical Genres

Edited by

Stephen E. Neaderhiser

Utah State University Press

Logan

© 2022 by University Press of Colorado

Published by Utah State University Press

An imprint of University Press of Colorado

245 Century Circle, Suite 202

Louisville, Colorado 80027

All rights reserved

The University Press of Colorado is a proud member of the Association of University Presses.

The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State University, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, University of Alaska Fairbanks, University of Colorado, University of Denver, University of Northern Colorado, University of Wyoming, Utah State University, and Western Colorado University.

ISBN: 978-1-64642-291-3 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-64642-292-0 (ebook)

https://doi.org/10.7330/9781646422920

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Neaderhiser, Stephen E. (Stephen Edwin), 1978– editor.

Title: Writing the classroom : pedagogical documents as rhetorical genres / edited by Stephen E. Neaderhiser.

Description: Logan : Utah State University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022032109 (print) | LCCN 2022032110 (ebook) | ISBN 9781646422913 (paperback) | ISBN 9781646422920 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Education, Higher—Curricula. | College teaching. | English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching (Higher) | Literary form—Study and teaching (Higher)

Classification: LCC LB2361 .W75 2022 (print) | LCC LB2361 (ebook) | DDC 378.1/99—dc23/eng/20220718

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022032109

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022032110

Cover illustration © sibiranna/Shutterstock.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Shedding Light on Genres in the Service of Pedagogy

Stephen E. Neaderhiser

Part 1: Genres in the Classroom

1. The Syllabus: A Gateway to or Gatekeeper of the Profession

Michael Albright

2. Feminist Writing Assignments: Enacting Pedagogy through Classroom Genres

Kate Navickas

3. Patterns, Negotiations, and Ideologies: Contract Grading as Genre

Virginia M. Schwarz

4. Evaluative Feedback Genres: Sites for Exploring Writing Teacher Development

Jessica Rivera-Mueller

5. Occlusion in a Classroom Genre Set: Assessing Assignment Sheets and Grading Rubrics

Dustin Morris and Lindsay Clark

Part 2: Genres Surrounding the Classroom

6. But Nobody Looks at These!: Making the Rhetorical Case for Syllabi of Record

Amy Ferdinandt Stolley and Christopher Toth

7. Is It in the Handbook?: The Role of Departmental Teaching Handbooks in Developing Pedagogical Identity

Dana Comi

8. Am I Covered for That?: Examining the Work of Policy Documents in the First-Year Course

Mark A. Hannah and Christina Saidy

9. Recommendation, Requirement, and Reproduction: Sanctioned Uptake in Classroom Accessibility Statements

Matt Dowell

10. Written in Homely Discourse: A Case Study of Intellectual and Institutional Identity in Teaching Genres

Megan Schoen, Jim Nugent, Cindy Mooty, and Lori Ostergaard

11. Performing Reflection in Institutional Contexts: A Genre Approach to Compelled Reflective Writing

Lesley Erin Bartlett

Part 3: Genres beyond the Classroom

12. Genre Anxiety: The Pedagogical, Political, and Emotional Work of Making a Certificate

Laura R. Micciche and Lora Arduser

13. Pedagogical Identity in a Digital World: Challenge and Collaboration in the Course Proposal Genre

Cynthia Pengilly

14. Toward the Learning to Teach Statement

Megan Knight and Kate Nesbit

15. COGs in the Pedagogical Machine: The Structuration, Rhetorical Situations, and Perigenres Surrounding Classroom Observation Guidelines

Zack K. De Piero

16. Outcomes Statements as Meta-Genres: The (Transformative) Role of Outcomes Statements in Program Revision

Logan Bearden

Index

About the Authors

Acknowledgments

Much like the genres explored within, this book does not exist in isolation. It is the result of conversations, collaborations, and inspirations from long before I ever sent out the initial CFP. I am extremely grateful to everyone who helped make Writing the Classroom a reality.

Most importantly, I want to acknowledge and thank the contributors in this collection, all of whom have affirmed and demonstrated how the genres of teaching deserve critical attention—for both pedagogical and scholarly merits. I valued all our conversations on the rhetorical complexity of pedagogical genres, carried out in the margins of manuscript drafts, through phone calls, and over video chats. I appreciated their commitment throughout the course of developing this collection, but I became even more appreciative when, in the middle of the process, the world seemed to grind to a halt with the advent of a pandemic. I am grateful for their dedication to ensuring this collection would be a success.

I also want to thank the team at Utah State University Press, especially Rachael Levay, acquisitions editor, whose early interest in the book and continued feedback gave me encouragement and guidance throughout the process. My most sincere thanks go out to our external reviewers as well, who gave constructive and supportive criticism through multiple iterations of the chapters, all to the betterment and strengthening of the collection as a whole.

I am also grateful to my academic colleagues, who acted as readers not of the collection itself but of the many genres that contributed to its formation—calls for proposals, acceptance emails, prospectuses, memos, and so many others. Special thanks go to Jayne Moneysmith, Katrina Bloch, Jen Cunningham, Aaron Toscano, and Angela Holzmeister, all of whose time, patience, and support were invaluable in making this edited collection possible.

Writing the Classroom

Introduction

Shedding Light on Genres in the Service of Pedagogy

Stephen E. Neaderhiser

At first glance, a syllabus is just a syllabus. Many (if not most) of us in academia have created course syllabi, and we all certainly received our fair share as students ourselves. The syllabus’s purpose seems fairly straightforward: to give an overview of a class’s topic, expectations, policies, and activities. It is one of the first documents that students come into contact with at the outset of a new class, and it provides necessary information for how that class will operate. However, as a genre, the syllabus is far from simple. It doesn’t just describe a class that already exists; it gives shape and definition to the classroom itself, articulating the teacher’s vision of the dynamic that will emerge over the duration of the course. It becomes a constitutional document, outlining subjectivities and relationships for the shared classroom participants, and it gives students their first view of their teacher’s identity as a professional, as an academic, and—perhaps most importantly—as a teacher.

Even outside of the classroom, that same syllabus represents potential engagement in other academic contexts where a teacher’s professional identity and pedagogical activity are expressed, assessed, or influenced. The syllabus might, in fact, be operative in the course’s very formation, as a university curriculum board may review it along with a course proposal before the class is approved. Alternatively, hiring committees may request sample syllabi as evidence of job applicants’ past teaching experience and pedagogical approach, and reappointment/tenure review boards may ask for teaching observations to include commentary on an instructor’s syllabi and other classroom documents as a way to ensure faculty are holding to departmental or university teaching standards. Separate from the students and classrooms for which a syllabus might be written, there are multiple other scenarios with different audiences interested in that syllabus—each with its own expectations, ways of reading, and intended outcomes.

What an example like the syllabus shows is that when faculty create pedagogical documents, they are not only writing for the classroom—for students—but also about the classroom for other academic scenarios and audiences. They are composing the reality of that classroom, complete with subjectivities associated with student learning and teacherly identity while also being influenced by external factors ranging from disciplinary values to administrative mandates. It is this dynamic of pedagogical genres, including classroom genres like the syllabus but also the many other genres composed within academia for pedagogical purposes, that is explored in the chapters collected within Writing the Classroom.

As the collection’s subtitle indicates, pedagogical documents represent rhetorically complex actions, genres operating within a network of academic contexts. This has implications beyond any single genre: if we understand genres as shaping a discourse community, then understanding the rhetorical nature of pedagogical genres can give us insight into the academic pedagogical community. Furthermore, by recognizing the rhetorical complexity of pedagogical genres, we in turn support the practitioners whose academic and professional identities are intimately tied to the writing they do in the service of teaching: faculty instructors, departmental administrators, and even graduate students in the process of developing their academic identities. When faculty create new courses and curricula, their ability to promote that pedagogical work as a valued contribution to their department and school can either be supported or constrained by whether the documents reflecting that activity—such as course proposals or syllabi of record—are recognized as professional academic activity, with implications for reappointment, tenure, and promotion. When departments establish shared teaching practices, their ability to give guidance can either be clarified or obscured by the documents faculty members are expected to consult—such as policy statements or teaching handbooks—when crafting their own classroom genres, with implications for how faculty negotiate their membership within the shared community identity while also asserting their own individual agency. For graduate students, their ability to enter and engage the academic community can either be endorsed or undermined by how the documents showcasing their ability to teach—such as statements of teaching philosophy or sample teaching materials—are understood as representing not only their current experience but also their capacity to build their teacherly identity further, with implications for their success at getting a job within academia. Clearly, pedagogical genres are more than just two-dimensional documents exclusively defined by static, functional purposes.

Rhetorical Genre Studies and the Situations of Pedagogy

The contributors to Writing the Classroom explore how documents written for pedagogical purposes represent complex rhetorical genres that construct, reflect, and endorse teachers’ professional activities and identities—within the classroom, but also outside of it. Such an exploration is made possible, in large part, by scholarship from rhetorical genre studies (RGS), inspired by Carolyn Miller’s seminal 1984 essay, Genre as a Social Action. In the decades since Miller established her titular thesis, asserting that genres are typified rhetorical actions based on recurrent situations (159), RGS scholars have contributed to how we understand genres as rhetorical, social, and situated actions that both shape and reflect the discourse communities within which they are used. Anne Freadman (1994, 2002) has identified the rhetorical and social interaction represented in a genre’s uptake, which she describes as demonstrating the ongoing call-and-response within a continuum of genres, with each genre anticipating—and prompting—potential responses that can be taken up and made real in the actions of subsequent or corresponding genres. Janet Giltrow (2002) has similarly provided insight into the dialogic nature of genres with her classification of meta-genres, genres themselves that also coordinate—and regulate—the interactive potential between other genres within the same situated context. Further, scholars such as Amy Devitt (1991), Charles Bazerman (1994b), and Anis Bawarshi (2001) have presented genre case studies to investigate how systems and sets of interrelated genres inform and facilitate a variety of professional and public processes. As Bawarshi notes, recognizing the situated nature of genre isn’t just a matter of identifying a static backdrop upon which a genre operates, but rather a way to understand the sociorhetorical ecosystems within which communication and communicators take place and are made possible—the conditions that prompt us to write and that our writing makes possible (2001, 78). Whether by showing how courtroom instructions construct—and complicate—the subsequent uptake of a jury’s verdict statement (Devitt et al. 2003) or how the genre of the scientific article has evolved since the seventeenth century (Bazerman 1988), RGS scholars have shown that genres should not be underestimated or dismissed as static documents, neutral in transmission, with interchangeable scenarios or passive audiences.

Writing the Classroom draws on RGS as the prevailing theoretical framework for studying pedagogical genres, but the collection also responds to calls arguing that increased critical genre awareness is itself a pedagogical imperative. In fact, the intersection of genre and pedagogy frequently plays a part in RGS scholarship. Bawarshi (2001), Devitt (2004), and Mary Jo Reiff (2004) have each advocated for teaching genre awareness in the classroom, arguing it not only helps students learn to write specific genres but also enhances their critical awareness of the ideological frameworks that enable or restrict their ability to take ownership of the genres they are asked to write—now or in the future. Likewise, Elizabeth Wardle’s (2009) proposal to shift the focus of first-year composition courses to writing about writing stresses the importance of providing students with critical awareness that will aid them in writing the genres of the academy (778), and subsequent scholarship on knowledge transfer has employed the concept of uptake as a way to consider how to teach transferable genre awareness (Rice 2015; Rounsaville 2012). Students have even been encouraged to examine pedagogical genres specifically, as a pathway toward genre awareness. Devitt, for example, describes having her first-year-writing students collect and analyze course syllabi, noting that such activities can reveal [to students] much about expected language, tone, and content and show more clearly the ideology underlying the syllabus genre as well as the range of choices teachers can already make (2004, 200).

In addition to considering how genre analysis can help students understand the choices involved with the act of writing, however, I and the many contributors to this collection believe it is vital to understand how genre shapes pedagogy itself—not just in considering how students take up genres as part of their education, but also in recognizing how teachers engage and negotiate with the genres of their teaching experience. As Devitt (2009) explains, it’s essential that we practice what we preach—that the critical genre awareness we seek to foster in our students must be reflected in our own genred experience as teachers: The first and most important genre pedagogy, then, is the teacher’s genre awareness: the teacher being conscious of the genre decisions he or she makes and what those decision will teach students (339). And even outside of genre studies scholarship, calls for the critical recognition of pedagogical genres commonly appear in the background of books and essays on topics ranging from faculty development to writing program administration (Alsup 2006; Desmet 2005; Franke 2010). Pedagogical genres may not always be at the forefront of such conversations, but they are often noted as playing instrumental (yet underacknowledged) roles in providing insight and agency within the academic experience.

Examining and understanding the genres used in and by a community can, as Carol Berkenkotter and Thomas Huckin (1995) assert, reveal much about a discourse community’s norms, epistemology, ideology, and social ontology (25). This is certainly the case for academic institutions, as Bazerman (1994a) demonstrates in his illustration of the complex network of genres underpinning the classroom:

There are genres that flow from the surrounding institutions into the classroom to regulate it; there are genres within the classroom that carry out the mandate of the regulation; and there are genres that flow out from the classroom that represent the work and competence of teacher and student, thereby holding them accountable to institutional expectations. It is our choice whether those definitions of the classroom and the genres that act out these definitions are wholeheartedly accepted, wholeheartedly resisted, compromised with, or sublated into some fuller understanding of our tasks. Whichever choice we make, we must consider the prices and responsibilities of our institutional places. (60)

Bazerman’s description of the flow between genres presages Giltrow’s characterization of meta-genres as the atmospheres surrounding genres (Giltrow 2002, 195). Furthermore, he highlights the implications associated with the pedagogical genres to which this collection seeks to draw further attention—both the genres located within specific academic settings (including the classroom) and the meta-genres regulating the flow of genres between those settings. By investigating the interrelated and rhetorical nature of pedagogical genres, not only can we identify and define the choices dictating our academic pedagogical practices, but we can also recognize and navigate the tensions existing within those decisions.

Occlusion in (and of) Pedagogical Genres

Even though RGS scholars often highlight the classroom as a nexus of genre and pedagogy, there is otherwise a noticeable lack of sustained discussion regarding the pedagogical genres that are regularly part of academic life. For example, in his book Genre and the Invention of the Writer, Bawarshi describes the syllabus’s dominance in shaping and enforcing relationships between a teacher and students, alongside other classroom genres. He notes, however, that it is curious that, as significant a genre as it is, the syllabus has received so little critical attention (2003, 120). There is, of course, an abundance of literature on the syllabus, but the large majority of that literature qualifies as guides and advice texts describing the form of the syllabus, with only superficial attention to its rhetorical, situated context. They do not interrogate how the syllabus frames the discursive and ideological site of action in which teacher and students engage in coordinated commitments, relations, subjectivities, and practices (120). The rhetorical qualities of pedagogical genres have largely been glossed over in the literature of teaching, meaning we have at best a partial view of how those genres flow between situations and subjectivities (to recall Bazerman). We are also less capable of ensuring that the best practices of pedagogy are endorsed and perpetuated when new instructors or administrators are faced with the need to compose those genres for the first time.

When Carolyn Miller first presented her argument for genres being social actions, one implication she addressed was how this new approach broadens the range of genres that merit critical study—not just traditional or classic genres, like the apologia or public address, but also more quotidian de facto genres, like the letter of recommendation, the user manual, the progress report, the ransom note, the lecture, and the white paper (1984, 155). Miller’s call to acknowledge the critical merit of genres otherwise overlooked is particularly relevant to the study of pedagogical genres. A parallel focus that recognizes the value of studying academic genres can be found in English for academic purposes (EAP) scholarship. Similarly inspired by Miller’s formative essay but within the field of applied linguistics, EAP scholars have used genre study to investigate activity within academic discourse communities. Citing Miller’s advocacy for de facto genres, John Swales (1990) argued that analyzing academic genres could potentially reveal valuable insights:

As students and struggling scholars, we may learn that we may create a research space for ourselves, we may promote the interests of our discourse community, we may fight either for or against its expansion, we may uncouple the chronological order of research action from the spatial order of its description and justification, we may approach unexpected sources for funding, or we may negotiate academic or editorial decisions. (1990, 44)

EAP’s impetus for genre study was further solidified by Swales’s (1996) classification of the occluded genres of the academy that work behind the scenes to support scholarly activity, like the manuscript submission letter or book proposal.

On one hand, they are typically formal documents which remain on file; on the other, they are rarely part of the public record. They are written for specific individual or small-group audiences, and yet may also be seriously invested with demonstrated scholarship and seriously concerned with representing their authors in a favourable professional light. (1996, 46)

These genres are not public scholarship in and of themselves but are often instrumental in enabling someone to navigate the academic community, advance their professional identity, and produce scholarly work. EAP scholars have argued that occluded genres are vital components of the academic community and have applied Swales’s analytical framework to the study of several such genres, including those supporting the publishing process, like manuscript submission letters (Shaw et al. 2014), reader review comments (Hewings 2004), and editor decisions (Flowerdew and Dudley-Evans 2002). Additionally, EAP scholars have analyzed how occluded genres operate as gatekeepers for new members within academia, in cases like graduate school application statements (Wang and Flowerdew 2016), letters of recommendation (Vidali 2009), and dissertation proposals (Cheng 2014).

However, despite the apparent level of interest in studying genres that underwrite the academic community, EAP scholarship has focused almost exclusively on academic research genres. In fact, this collection represents an effort to draw a parallel between the study of genres supporting academic research identities and the study of the genres supporting academic pedagogical identities. As I have argued elsewhere, many academic professionals embody both roles—scholar and teacher—yet the writing they do in the service of pedagogy is often occluded, much in the same way Swales describes occlusion in academic research genres (Neaderhiser 2016b). Genres of teaching often occupy a space between public and private: written for small groups or limited readers (perhaps only a classroom of students or a curriculum committee) but meant to enable a teacher to conduct the more visible work of pedagogy. While the classroom is often considered the face of teaching, as the primary location where teaching can be visibly witnessed, the pedagogical enterprise is much more expansive, spanning the many academic arenas wherein faculty represent their teacherly identities, promote and advocate for pedagogical values, and participate in decisions influencing policy and practice. In order to do these things, multiple genres are employed—some meant for direct classroom use, but others that occur before a class is formed or even afterward, as reflections of classroom activity for entirely external purposes. And, like the example of the syllabus I described at the start of this introduction, even genres recognized as primarily classroom-based may play a part in other academic venues extending beyond a single classroom. In recognizing these diverse scenarios and purposes, pedagogical genres can be un-occluded (as EAP scholars have done for occluded research genres) and studied as academic genres that both facilitate and endorse teachers’ pedagogical activity and, consequently, their professional academic identities. Acknowledging and prioritizing the value of analyzing occluded pedagogical genres is not just a theoretical matter. There are material concerns that directly impact teachers when the genres and context of pedagogy are occluded, especially when that occlusion potentially leads to pedagogical genres working at cross-purposes—a reality addressed by many of the chapters in this collection.

Select scholarship has already set the stage for a concerted inquiry into the occluded nature of pedagogical genres. Irene Clark’s (2005) examination of assignment prompts highlights how teachers can use the genre to negotiate their identities as participant readers in student writing, and David Thomas Sumner’s (2001) study of the syllabus shows how it offers instructors the opportunity to construct a sustainable pedagogical and disciplinary identity. Similarly, I have analyzed the statement of teaching philosophy as a pedagogical genre—external of the classroom—wherein both novice and experienced teachers negotiate tensions between the genre’s value as a reflective document and its common use as an evaluative document in job searches and faculty reviews (Neaderhiser 2016a). Dylan Dryer (2012) has also explored how graduate teaching assistants might struggle with genres meant to reflect their identities as teachers while they themselves still identify as students. Dryer notes that these genres extend beyond obvious classroom teaching genres, like syllabi or assignment prompts, to include the many smaller genres teaching assistants must compose, like office announcements, student rosters, and grade feedback, all of which "help produce the identities of novice graduate students/novice composition teachers by operationalizing the routines and subject positions through which these students and teachers become learners and teachers (442). Dryer argues for a critical understanding of pedagogical genres that deroutinize[s] the practices such genres make commonsensical, transparent, or otherwise beneath notice" (442). It is this sort of critical genre awareness that Writing the Classroom endorses and promotes, with a purview encompassing not only classroom-centric genres such as assignment prompts, syllabi, or evaluative feedback, but also pedagogical genres that operate in the academic contexts of department or program administration, such as course proposals, departmental teaching handbooks, or policy statements.

This collection stands as a model of how pedagogical genres can be analyzed and recognized as rhetorical actions that (a) construct and endorse individual teacherly identity, (b) shape and reflect academic discourse communities, and (c) function within dynamic genre systems in multiple rhetorical scenarios. However, the contributors to Writing the Classroom are not content with simply proving that pedagogical genres warrant serious scholarly study. In addition to interrogating how the subjectivities of the teaching experience are constructed by and through genre, these chapters explore how those genres evolve, change shape, and even take on new dimensions as they come into contact with new voices and purposes. How, for example, are intentions of uptake complicated when institutional policy statements or administrative outcomes are applied not only to student audiences but also to the faculty expected to fold those statements into their pedagogical material? How do instances of a genre like the course proposal expand to address not only the pedagogical goals of a single department but also the interdisciplinary relationships within an institution? What happens when writers push the boundaries of genres meant to be guides or reflections of individual teacher development, like handbooks or teaching statements? Equally, what happens when pedagogical genres push back against efforts to add new intentionality or subjectivities to their purpose? These are but a few of the questions taken up within Writing the Classroom as a critical study of pedagogical genres, meant to benefit both experienced and beginning teachers while also contributing new insights to the broader theoretical frameworks of genre study.

Chapter Overview

The sixteen essays in this book explore a diverse set of genres that influence and reflect the pedagogical decisions, experiences, and identities of teachers both within the classroom and beyond its boundaries. By employing a variety of methodological frameworks, including corpus analysis, reflective narrative, and ethnographic study, the contributors show how our critical awareness of pedagogical genres is enhanced by different analytical approaches. Readers will recognize the influences of both RGS and EAP as the contributors investigate the influence of pedagogical meta-genres, questions of both student and faculty uptake, and issues of pedagogical occlusion. These essays, however, are not just an application of prior genre theory; in their analyses, the contributors draw on social and cultural theories, psychological and legal concepts, organizational studies, and professional writing scholarship to add new ways to understand the social and rhetorical nature of genres. In bringing these voices together, Writing the Classroom generates a critical dialogue that not only sheds much-needed light on the wide range of pedagogical genres within academia but also shows how the lessons learned by analyzing those genres can reciprocally enhance further genre theory and studies—both in the realm of pedagogy and beyond to the other academic and professional communities within which genres play fundamental roles.

Part 1 opens the collection with what might be considered the most traditional location of pedagogical genres: the classroom, a site where the construction of documents like syllabi or assignment prompts highlights the complex rhetorical work teachers often do to foster a space of learning. Michael Albright interrogates how the standardized or common syllabus transforms the syllabus genre into a protected, read-only document that withholds layers of context from the instructors required to use it—who are often themselves contingent faculty. Such a transformation, he argues, not only undermines those instructors’ individual professional authority and pedagogical values within the classroom, but also alienates them from the broader teaching community with serious implications for their ability to showcase their pedagogical identity and activity in other academic contexts, such as in full-time faculty applications or teaching evaluations. Kate Navickas further reinforces the notion that pedagogical genres operate as a direct endorsement of a teacher’s identity in her analysis of writing assignment prompts written by self-identified feminist teachers. Through her investigation of how those assignments assert subjectivities and arguments associated with feminist theory, Navickas shows the assignment prompt genre to be a crucial locus connecting teachers and students to a particular academic genealogy and history, and argues that it is incumbent upon faculty to ensure the pedagogical values of their personal academic genealogy are visibly endorsed within the genres they intend to be taken up by students. Even though Navickas and Albright examine different genres, their analyses show how classroom genres like the syllabus or assignment prompt can either occlude or enable a teacher’s ability to create pedagogical connections to both their students and the broader academic communities within which they seek to participate.

Critical genre analysis can also show how classroom genres act as a conduit for disciplinary values to manifest within a teacher’s practice, as Virginia M. Schwarz demonstrates in her comparative analysis of the grading contract genre as it has emerged from assessment scholarship. Schwarz shows how rhetorical variations in the different models of grading contracts correlate with ideological frameworks that cast both students and teachers in significantly different types of roles, thus exposing a contested situational context that calls into question the genre’s supposed stability. As she argues, the grading contract genre must be strategically negotiated in order to ensure pedagogical values and practices align with the genre’s activity—by individual teachers as well as administrators and assessment scholars advocating for contract grading as a socially just practice. Jessica Rivera-Mueller explores a similar dynamic in evaluative feedback genres, using practitioner self-study to analyze grade feedback letters she wrote for students in her own teacher education courses. Through her reflective study, Rivera-Mueller considers how the feedback genre allows her to model a teacherly identity while also enabling her to inhabit a position of situated expertise and authority. However, she also observes how the genre can push back against individual pedagogical goals, when tensions arise between the genred expectation of authoritative evaluation and her individual desire to communicate a more intimate sense of supportive encouragement. Both Schwarz and Rivera-Mueller’s insights demonstrate not only how teachers can utilize classroom genres to connect to broader disciplinary values, but also how those genres might resist efforts to negotiate new subjectivities beyond those imposed by external academic contexts.

Dustin Morris and Lindsay Clark return to the assignment prompt as a base of study, analyzing its activity in conjunction with grading rubrics, thus demonstrating how pedagogical genres don’t operate in isolation but rather as part of a genre system that both supports teachers’ pedagogical goals and generates student uptake. While the two genres’ rhetorical moves are contextually situated at different stages of the writing process, with the assignment prompt initiating student uptake and the rubric dictating the subsequent assessment of the completed assignment, Morris and Clark show how the two genres work in concert to construct more complex subjectivities taken up by teachers and students mutually engaged in the holistic process of writing. In addition to exploring the interconnected nature of pedagogical genres within the classroom setting, their study highlights the risk of occlusion and its implications when that genred interactivity is left unacknowledged.

Part 2 continues to explore genres traditionally attributed to the classroom, but it also considers the scope of those genres outside of the classroom, where they often operate as meta-genres influencing the rhetorical contexts of other academic scenarios, such as curriculum review, faculty development, or administrative oversight. Amy Ferdinandt Stolley and Christopher Toth bring our attention back to the syllabus, but with a specific focus on the syllabus of record (SOR): a course’s initial blueprint when added to the curriculum, often kept as an institutional record but rarely used within actual classroom settings. Through an account of their department’s collaborative overhaul of SORs for accreditation review, Stolley and Toth show how the genre not only contributes to a course’s continued pedagogical relevance but also can become a dialogic action representing the shared pedagogical values of a departmental faculty community. Similarly, Dana Comi explores how departmental teaching handbooks function as a meta-generic resource for new teachers in a graduate program. Comi combines genre analysis with discourse-based interviews to examine how the teaching handbook regulates graduate teaching assistants’ relationships with the genres they use in the classroom, and how their uptake represents efforts to negotiate a balance between their developing pedagogical identities and their graduate program’s community identity. As she demonstrates, an analysis of meta-genres like the teaching handbook reveals both the productive and limiting forces shaping initiate teachers’ perceptions of such genres as generative resources, consulted guidelines, or the final word on what they are allowed to do (and be) as teachers.

Mark Hannah and Christina Saidy continue the focus on the meta-generic movement of pedagogical genres between institutional settings and individual classrooms, but from the perspective of program administration. Through a content analysis of policy documents, they explore how departmental policies broadly articulate shared pedagogical values, but also how such policies can become coercive pedagogical imperatives that inhibit individual teachers’ agency and complicate students’ uptake. Their findings also contribute to the broader study of rhetorical genre, with their identification of the rhetorical bleed that can occur within genre systems and the tensions that can result from that bleed. As a counterpart to Hannah and Saidy’s chapter, Matt Dowell narrows the focus to examine policy statements specifically addressing disability accommodation and classroom accessibility through a purposeful analysis of accessibility policy statements—as well as the framing language that accompanies those statements within faculty teaching resources. He uses this analysis to examine how instructors are sanctioned for particular uptake options and how that sanction expresses itself in both senses of the term, with faculty constrained to specific social actions articulated within the policy statements while also being granted authorized allowances by the language describing how they are expected to include the policy within their own classroom genres like the syllabus. Additionally, Dowell draws on disability studies scholarship to show how these statements are not ideologically isolated but rather rhetorical social actions with ableist implications for students, instructors, and faculty administrators. These two chapters provide valuable insight and increased visibility for broader policy documents and individual policy statements, both of which are too often occluded not only in pedagogical contexts but also in the authorship by which they come into being.

Megan Schoen, Jim Nugent, Cindy Mooty, and Lori Ostergaard further demonstrate how pedagogical genres act as conduits between classroom and institutional contexts. Taking up both Carolyn Miller’s notion of homely discourse and John Swales’s concept of occluded genres, the authors study the genres used by instructors within a single writing program over the course of seven years—an important historical timeframe after the program transitioned into an independent department. Through a comparative analysis of syllabi and assignment descriptions, they show how those documents are more than artifacts of institutional history; they are genred agents of social action that forged a new academic identity for faculty within the program-turned-department. Alternatively, Lesley Bartlett explores the restricting impact of institutionalized assessment standards on genred uptakes, pedagogical practice, and culture. Drawing on her experience at a university that instituted curriculum-wide reflective writing requirements in response to state educational mandates, Bartlett examines how such mandates influence a system of genres broadly dictating the pedagogical practices endorsed by programs, taught by teachers, and taken up by students. Her investigation highlights tensions that can arise within a genre system that intersects multiple academic contexts, as well as how those tensions may be occluded to some stakeholders—and glaringly visible to others.

Last, part 3 maintains focus on the broader ecosystem of genres in academic contexts, but with attention to the genres that facilitate pedagogical activity and identity entirely outside of the classroom. Laura Micciche and Lora Arduser analyze the genred activity of curriculum development, based on their experience proposing a new certificate program within their department. They argue that even though the curricular proposal might seem a purely functional and stable workhorse genre with straightforward outcomes and uptakes, it is actually a living document exposing emotional tensions and pedagogical assumptions as it circulates through various academic communities involved in curricular review. Micciche and Arduser’s analysis shows how the proposal genre can act as a destabilizing force, activating departmental anxieties